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The significance of Google's AndroidMy friend Rod Drury pointed to this great piece explaining the significance of Google's Android mobile platform. There are lots of quotable sound-bites, but I'll tease you with three:
Read the piece, it's fascinating!
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Comments: 2
Sven [ 6 December 2007 11:30 PM]
Even though i really appreciate another open handset platform the Android platform is still Java and therefore doomed.
Kevin Curry [ 7 December 2007 06:38 AM]
I have a lot of problems with what I am reading. I don't disagree with the opening argument. I can appreciate some bold thinking and some of the lofty objectives alluded to in the blog, but...
1. "Every android is a Web 2.0 citizen." What does that mean exactly? There's no definition for "Web 2.0 citizen." Mr. Drury scopes it as "produces and consumes content." That might pass as a very loose definition for "read/write web," but isn't even in the same universe as the metaphor of "citizen" (which implies, "identity," "civil governance," "democracy," and much more). Marketing gibberish that statement is.
2. What is the significance of the the claim that 95% of our time is spent with those tasks? Is that because those are the tasks we like most? Are those the tasks that are least usable and take the longest to perform? I spend less than 5% of the time using the browser because the hardware support is lousy - my phone is not the best tool for the job. And if I do need content on my phone then SMS is perfectly fine to tell me what I need. That claim seems a little too similar to "95% of all shark attacks on humans happen in less than 5 feet of water."
3. Aren't we really just headed toward pocket-sized devices that have the firepower of today's laptops? Do we need a new operating system for that?
4. Just because $10M is more than the marketing budgets of most OS providers doesn't mean that it's more than their non-marketing investments, but more importantly doesn't say anything about where the experience comes from.
5. 200 man years is more than NASA spent on some of the Mars landers. Not necessarily a bad thing on Google's part, but does seem a bit out of whack.
There's always interesting stuff happening inside Google and this is probably no exception. But I'm not ready to call this significant even within the super niche community of mobile platform application programmers (disclosure: of which I am not a part).